(a)social computing conference

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50878.html

I've just spent three rewarding and exhausting days at the IEEE Social Computing Conference in Vancouver.

It was an odd experience for me as by far the majority of papers and presentations seemed to have a lot to do with computing (most predominantly various forms of network analysis and visualisation, plus a fair bit on technologies of privacy and security) and very little to do with 'social'. One of the more spectacularly glaring omissions was any notable use of social technologies before, during or after the conference, apart from a few bottom-up initiatives. In fact, given that this was a computing conference, use of computers was altogether pretty dire, with the most appallingly designed registration process I have ever encountered, that suggest its designers had never considered users let alone followed anything like a user-centred design process. The conference website is something out of the 1990s. At least the network was fine, but that was provided by the hotel.

A few speakers asked people in the audience about their use of various social systems and it was more than slightly bizarre to be among the minority of delegates using big players like Facebook, Digg, Flickr and Twitter, let alone less popular social apps. I find it almost incomprehensible that some social software programmers can be so utterly divorced from the use of the things that they are studying and developing. Except that, as a breed, computer scientists are not known to be the most sociable of people.

Despite this gaping hole, there were some great people and there was some good stuff to be found there including fine sessions from Ben Shneiderman, Bebo White, Barry Smyth, a big contingent of creative folk from MIT MediaLab, and many more. There was some fascinating research relating to the use of sensors and wearable devices and even the mainstream of network analysis and visualisation papers, as well as those considering privacy, security and access control, held some great potential insights and discoveries. Again, however, it was depressing to see how few had performed any follow-ups or studies with real people to find out what social factors might be lurking behind the effects they were seeing in the abstracted data or how their designs might be used by real people. A panel hosted by Jenny Preece followed up Ben Schneiderman's talk in considering the big ethical and related issues that social software engenders, which was refreshing and a necessary counterpoint to all this abstraction of humans into nodes and edges, but it stood out from the mainstream themes as a distinct oddity.

The conference certainly helped to inspire me with some ideas, refinements of ideas and issues I'd not thought about well enough before, so it was well worthwhile, but if that was 'social computing' I hate to imagine what it might be like without the 'social'!

Social software programmer/researcher wanted (Canada)

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50755.html

Terry Anderson and I are leading a small project at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada taking a design-based research approach to exploring ways of using social software for learning.

We need someone with a computing degree or equivalent experience to extend and improve aspects of Elgg, as well as to integrate and mash it up with other systems (specifically Moodle and the Project Wonderland immersive environment). PHP and/or Java programming experience would be useful. The post holder will also research and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions using the software so will need to be a great communicator, ideally with experience of participative approaches to design and/or qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The things we are trying to do will hopefully be of benefit to anyone in education who wants to use Elgg as their social software. We hope this will be ground-breaking work that will lead to publications etc, so it would be good for someone wanting to break into learning technologies research.

This post can be remotely located, but occasional visits to Edmonton, Alberta would be required, and Canadian residents and citizens will be considered before anyone else.

Full details are available at https://athabascau.hua.hrsmart.com/ats/js_job_details.php?reqid=469

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50936.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1402

Some great ‘hey wow!’ statistics and facts about social media use of the sort one tends to see a lot in keynotes. Not all of the facts are reliable or significant but there’s a very good list of sources to verify their plausibility and, while we might quibble with the odd detail here and there, the overall message is clear: this stuff is *big*.
Created:Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:26:00 GMT

New WebGL standard aims for 3D Web without browser plugins

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50555.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1401

It looks like the 3D Web is nearing reality. The current generation of general-purpose immersive spaces (e.g. Second Life, There, Wonderland, OpenSim etc) are clunky, poorly-interoperable, resource-hungry monoliths that help to show the potential but are really not ready for mass adoption. These two initiatives (WebGL and O3D) should be exactly what is needed to build a truly standards-compliant and open immersive web. I recall similar arguments in the early to mid nineties about VRML and later X3D but maybe this is the bit of the puzzle that means we get the real thing at last!
Created:Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:47:00 GMT

MyTrybe

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50298.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1399

A collective approach to social networking. Instead of explicit friending, the system finds people like you and clusters those into your network.

I guess the big issue is the control that the creators exert in the choice of aspects that are considered in establishing similarity. You can select styles which establish the context that is of interest to you at a given time, each of which uses a set of explicit questions to find out about you (valuable info!). I suspect it could have some potentially interesting applications in education, especially on the informal and lifelong learning front, if it were to be open-sourced. Not so useful as a closed service like this.
Created:Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:29:33 GMT

Twitter hype punctured by study

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/45582.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1398

Is it possible that anyone is surprised by the news that 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 90% of the tweets? Or that over half Tweet less than once every 74 days? I suppose it is interesting when compared with the social network norm (10% produce 30% of the content) but it is certainly not newsworthy nor does it show anything unexpected about Twitter. There was no hype bubble to burst.

The study’s authors suggest that this makes it a one-to-many publishing service as though that is a bad thing. Of course, it *would* be a bad thing if there were any limits on who could publish, but there are not (well, censorship issues to one side for a moment).

It is much more interesting that, in the space of year, it grew by 1382%. That’s a big number – even Facebook only grew 228% in the same period. I’d be inclined to put that down to a few factors apart from the usual variants on Metcalfe’s law:

1) it’s very fast, very simple, very easy to get going – there is little investment needed in time, attention, computer power, etc

2) It exploits multiple technologies and their associated networks – not just computers but cellphones – and it fits neatly in everything from a widget to a web page.

3) unlike phone, email or SMS, it’s a push technology that doesn’t usually intrude too much or demand a response – even if it distracts, for most of us the 140 character limit keeps the distraction small, even less than RSS feeds.

4) Media hype and prominent celeb twitterers – there’s something very intimate and immediate about tweets that makes the view into someone’s personal life compulsive reading with very little effort.This certainly gave a boost.

5) Perhaps most importantly, it can ride on the back of other social networks. Despite their best belated efforts to compete, Twitter started by competing with no one and so was able to take full advantage of people exchanging info about their Twitter profiles on many social networks like Facebook, email, MySpace, etc. Throw in a dead simple API that makes it easy to integrate with other sites, so there is very little reinvestment in building a new social network needed, and it is almost surprising that it did not grow any faster. It is a compelling symbiotic (or maybe a bit parasitic) organism that thrives on other networks as well as building its own.

I find it interesting not so much for what it is but as an example of the way we must go forwards – to build small, open, agile, flexible, integratable services that enable a federation of networks and functionalities, building on what is already there and evolving fast. It is more than likely that Twitter will some day crash and burn or, more probably, get sucked into the genetic material of something else, but that is the nature of evolution and nothing to cry about.

Created:Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:21:48 GMT

What exams have taught me

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/45251.html

I have argued at some length on numerous occasions that exams, especially in their traditional unseen, time-limited, paper-based form, without access to books or Internet or friends, are the work of the devil and fundamentally wrong in almost every way that I can think of. They are unfair, resource-intensive, inauthentic, counter-productive, anti-educational, disspiriting, soulless products of a mechanistic age that represent an ethos that we should condemn as evil.

And yet they persist.

I have been wondering why something so manifestly wrong should maintain such a hold on our educational system even though it is demonstrably anti-educational. Surely it must be more than a mean-spirited small-minded attempt to ensure that people are who they say they are?

I think I have the answer.

Exams are so much a part of our educational system that pervade almost every subject area that they teach a deeper, more profound set of lessons than any of the subjects that they relate to. Clearly, from their ubiquity, they must relate to more important and basic things to learn than, say, maths, languages, or history. Subjects may come and subjects may go but the forms of assessment remain startlingly constant. So, I have been thinking about what exams taught me:

  • that slow, steady, careful work is not worth the hassle – a bit of cramming (typically one-three days seemed to work for me) in a mad rush just before the event works much more effectively and saves a lot of time
  • the corollary – adrenalin is necessary to achieve anything worth achieving
  • that the most important things in life generally take around three hours to complete
  • that extrinsic motivation, the threat of punishment and the lure of reward, is more important than making what we do fun, enjoyable and intrinsically rewarding
  • that we are judged not on what we achieve or how we grow but on how well we can display our skills in an intense, improbably weird and disconcerting setting

I learnt to do exams early in life better than I learnt most of the subjects I was examined on and have typically done far better than I deserve in such circumstances. I have learnt my lessons well in real life. I (mostly) hit deadlines with minutes to spare and seldom think about them more than a day or two in advance. I perform fairly well in adrenalin-producing circumstances. I summarise and display knowledge that I don’t really have to any great extent. I extemporise. I do things because I fear punishment or crave reward. I play to the rules even when the rules are insane. A bit of high blood pressure comes with the territory. Sometimes this is really useful but I am really trying hard to get out of the habit of always working this way and tp adopt some other approaches sometimes.

There are many other lessons that our educational systems teach us beyond the subject matter – I won’t even begin to explore what we learn from sitting in rows, staying quiet and listening to an authority figure tell us things but, suffice it to say, I haven’t retained much knowledge of grammar, calculus, geography or technical drawing, but I am still unlearning attitudes and beliefs that such bizarre practices instilled in me.

Assessment is good. Assessment tells us how we are doing, where we need to try new things, different approaches, as well as what we are doing right. Assessment is a vital part of the learning process, whether we do it ourselves or get feedback from others (both is best). But assessment should not be the goal. Assessment is part of the process.

Accreditation is good too. Accreditation tells the world that we can do what we claim we can do. it is important that there are ways to verify to others that we are capable (most obviously in the case of people on whom others depend greatly such as surgeons, bus drivers and university professors). Except in cases where the need to work under enormous pressure in unnatural conditions is a prerequisite (there are some occasions) I would just prefer that we relied on authentic evidence rather than this frighteningly artificial process that tells us very little about how people actually perform in the task domain that they are learning in.

The biggest problem comes when we combine and systematise assessment and accreditation into an industrialised, production-line approach to education, losing sight of the real goals. There are many other ways to do this that are less harmful or even positively useful (e.g. portfolios, evidence-based assessment, even vivas when done with care and genuine dialogue) and many are actually used in higher education. We just need more of them to redress the balance a bit.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/42189.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1397

Clay Shirky on typically brilliant form, here talking about cognitive surplus and what we do with it.

I love his rough calculation that the whole of Wikipedia, in all its language variants and including discussions, edits, lines of code and so on, amounts to around 100 million hours of thought. Coincidentally, that is the amount of time US viewers spend watching adverts on TV every weekend. That’s a lot of cognitive surplus just ripe for engaging in participative activities. He observes that the Internet-connected world spends around a trillion hours watching TV each year. If just one percent of that time shifted towards producing and sharing on the Internet, it would be equivalent to 100 Wikipedia-sized projects per year. And, of course, that is exactly what is happening, probably at a higher rate than that.

Let’s now imagine that one percent of that one percent could be turned to replacing our current processes of higher education. That’s one Wikipedia a year. Meanwhile the Internet continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, but still slightly less than a quarter of the world’s population have access to it. That’s a lot of growth potential – even a quarter of one percent would be a whole lot of brain power. We are just at the start of this revolution and have barely scratched the surface in terms of searching, filtering, connecting, aggregating and interacting with all of that content and all of those people. Assuming other things remain fairly equal and we don’t all vaporise or vanish down a hole of recession, it is hard to see how this cannot completely change higher education as we now know it.
Created:Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:17:04 GMT

Medieval wikis and blogs

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/41639.html

I was reading Norton's 'Readings in the History of Education' the other day (love my iPhone) because I am intrigued about how and, more especially, why our current university systems came to be. The book is full of wonderful gems, but a couple of things seemed particularly interesting:

1: The glosses

Readings were given from text that, over the centuries, was adapted through the use of glosses – essentially marginalia but, in some cases, greatly exceeding the volume of original text on the page. Often they were wrong, misguided, poorly thought through, but were often read with the same emphasis as the original text.

Wikipedia on parchment?

2: the travelling scholars

Equally interesting, before universities were formed, scholars would travel to learn from masters, wherever they might be. 

"in those days the school followed the teacher, not the teacher the school."

I particularly like this exerpt from Abelard's autobiography:

 "...I betook myself to a certain wilderness previously known to
me, and there on land given to me by certain ones, with the
consent of the Bishop of the region, I constructed out of reeds
and straw a sort of oratory in the name of the Holy Trinity
where, in company with one of our clergy, I might truly chant to
the Lord: "Lo I have wandered far off, and have remained in the
wilderness."

As soon as Scholars learned this they began to gather from every
side, leaving cities and castles to dwell in the wilderness, and
in place of their spacious homes to build small tabernacles for
themselves, and in place of delicate food to live on herbs of the
fields and coarse bread, and in place of soft couches to make up
[beds of] straw and grass, and in place of tables to pile up
sods."

I feel a certain sympathy with this approach (I am in the icy wastes of the Canadian Prairies because of the remarkable people here) but the main thing that bears mention is that it was individuals, not institutions, that attracted scholars.

Oddly like blogs?

It is interesting that, like scholars of old, some of the bloggers I like most (most notably Stephen Downes but, to an extent, most of my favourites) are often concerned more with the discovery and interpretation of other texts than with creating new ones. Of course, it is all much faster, easier, more networked but maybe a bit less impressive- John of Salisbury spent twelve years at Paris and at Chartres following his preferred masters (including Abelard), whereas twelve minutes is about all I can take of most blogs.

Why universities?

My interest in Norton's book stemmed from a concern that has bothered me for a long time that we are driven by the exigencies of the form of our buildings, the physics of everyday life and, maybe more, from the history that drove us there, to learn in ways that would make little sense if we were to start anew without such constraints.

Back then, for instance:

  • If you wanted to learn from a master, you used to have to travel to be with them. More masters, more travellers, more students. Not only that, more lawyers (oddly seen as a benefit way back then). This was very good for towns and cities and the scholars were given many privileges such as freedom from tax, their own law courts and so on, partly to encourage them to come and partly to give them the freedom to study, learn and think.
  • If you wanted to read (or, more often, hear) the great works of human knowledge (well, mainly Aristotle and the Bible) you had to go somewhere that there were copies of those books to be read. 
  • It made sense for many people to gather round a single lecturer as there were not enough books to go round.

These and maybe some other circumstances of course led to aggregation and the formation of universities that attracted more people to them like planets forming from dust or snowballs rolling down hills. Many similar contingent facts caused the formation of the strange, archaic and arcane system we use today. It was not always a direct path and ideas evolved and died along the way. Sadly the student domination of the university at Bologna was lost and we now all follow the Parisian, master-led system but, perhaps luckily, bad lecturers are no longer stoned (at least with stones).

We don't need to work that way any more (and, incidentally, it is bizarre that we reinforce this pattern with learning management systems). As we increasingly turn to learning from and with those we acknowledge as great in the online world, beyond the boundaries of universities, we are slowly reinventing the medieval pre-university system, with bells, whistles and some centuries of innovation, invention and discovery to improve things, of course. Wikipedia becomes our glosses, blogs become the reed-and-straw-built oratories and we gather round, despite the online discomfort, to listen to the wise. David Wiley has gone one step further down this road and offered personal certifications for those who attended his open course. Who needs universities?

Systems often develop more because of their history and context than because they are a good idea and universities, with their long and relentless history, are proof of this. There have been some big changes and innovations from time to time – the Humboldtian model and the open universities are particular milestones, but they really just embellished the existing deeper models. At Athabasca University (where I mostly work)  everything I teach is online and so are all the texts I use. I can teach to anyone, anywhere there is an Internet connection, any time. To maintain the traditions and processes of medieval universities is odd in the extreme and yet many of them are still there – convocations and silly gowns, deans, professors, doctors, degrees… Why? OK, I know we have to rub shoulders with the medievals and won't be accepted as serious scholars unless we do, but it is kind of crazy and a terrible waste of time, money and energy.

So why keep universities?

I think that universities do have some important roles to play still, beyond their credentialing function (one that evolved quite late in the day, incidentally). I love the fact that universities still have some of those inherited privileges from their forebears. We still need a system that gives uninterrupted space to think and freedom from the fear of getting it wrong or pursuing the ridiculous or arcane. We still need the space for young and old to discover the richness of our civilisations and their artefacts.

Is the university as we know it the best space for this, especially one that is online? I suppose one good thing is that a course at an open university like Athabasca gives people the excuse and the licence to make the space in their lives to learn and the resources from which to do so (though why does it have to always take place in units of around 100 hours?). It would be nice if we could make more opportunities for people to also hang out with the scholars. In medieval universities, for instance, lunch was an opportunity for masters to check that students had learnt the lessons of the day, and for students to question and debate issues that arose. Maybe comments on blogs fulfill some of that role – certainly the dialogue can get quite rich around some posts (if you want to comment on mine, by the way, it's probably best to go to the version at http://me2u.athabascau.ca/elgg/jond/weblog/ which allows comments from anyone – sadly seem to be disabled for visitors at the University of Brighton site) and Twitter, Facebook, etc can fill in some gaps here and there. However, we can go further. I think that we need to make our spaces more sociable, and give much greater value and recognition to sociability, provide opportunities for serendipity and enable cross-disciplinary fertilisation. It is worth remembering what it was that the early universities were trying to achieve. It wasn't just about economies of scale and academic freedom, but it was an opportunity for building knowledge, engendered by the drawing together of scholars with shared purposes and a passion for learning.